


The Basics of Forming Life

by Anonymous



Category: Black Mirror, Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe (Music Video)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Background Het, Background Poly, Background Relationships, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon Character of Color, Canon Queer Character, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Canon Relationships, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/F, Implied F/M, background F/M, background canon relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 17:04:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16288463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A sequel and an origin story.





	The Basics of Forming Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gwenfrankenstien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwenfrankenstien/gifts).



There’s a desert behind the ocean. Bright and golden and soft in a different sort of way. She likes the primary color scheme. Basic. Homey. She just likes it. It’s a good place they built here. 

Too bad Zen doesn’t remember it. 

It’s fine. This is a place for new memories, too. That’s why the ocean is right there. Why not add a little water, Jane had said. Freshen it up. 

Fresh as Jane, dark in the clean white of those rooms. More than apples—and when she’ll try to taste one again she’s not sure. 

Maybe Jane would. Or Ché. It’s something she’ll have to learn about them. 

 

The lights are Goldilocks right. Not too dim, not too bright against the stars. It’s like a dream, she tells Jane. That’s why I want it like that. It’s like…

The dream of meeting her. Hazy light spinning, she was spinning, they were spinning. It was a carousel and they were all dancing in it too.

It’s a club, and she knows the words for everything they did, but it takes Zen a while to name them. It’s easiest when she listens to Jane; her responses become regular then, and everything in her head is at its brightest. Zen loves that, loves remembering. 

The storytelling is its own gift. A different side to forgetting. 

 

Sometimes they go dancing in the desert instead. Why not mix the two, and so they go. The desert’s so much bigger, and more of a platform than the ocean—why not walk on the ocean water, she says, not meaning it. 

That’s not what they’re building. 

 

She lets Jane and Ché choose the music. The sound to go with the light. It’s their memory; they want to get it right, every part. Movement and sound with her light. 

 

Zen rearranges the little rods in the tubes, gently pulling them out with her pick(?), pushing them back in. Back. Forwards. One at a time. The tech is delicate, rare to a person on the run. 

It’s a start. 

 

It’s an end too. They find this out when the cleaners find them, and their little tubes are left behind in the cave. The trouble with deserts is they are never empty enough, no matter their bareness to the eye. Too many caves and not enough. 

Jane pulls them away, and they drop their tools to follow behind, as before, as always. Jane gets them out. 

 

Jane doesn’t know what they’re doing, she says. Or where they’re going. Somewhere they’ll have to fill, is all, Zen tells her. Ché hums. Heaven’s what you make it, he says. 

No, she tells them both. It’s where you make it. It’s not the first time we’ve started over. 

No one asks, and how many times will that be? 

That is the enemy, the precursor to cleaning, almost. Zen pushes it away, and they follow her lead. 

 

Jane is on her shoulder and the night is heavy with warmth. It’s not a desert night. It’s a full blown southern night; they’d followed the ocean and it is warmer than the desert, if not exactly the place they’d remembered. Not what they’d imagined and re-imagined. That is behind them with the tubes.

The memory is heavy too, and Zen doesn’t want to push it away. Too much of that in her past. She knows without asking how the same is true for Jane and Ché. She lets it sit instead, the weight of Jane against her cheek, turns her face into the dark hair, pressing lightly against it. 

 

It’s blue, the night is blue like the ocean and sometimes Jane is in the light and the moon makes her sparkle when she bends over, and Zen sighs beneath her, moving like water. 

 

The light is so much brighter down here. It’s real light. Zen makes note of it for the next time. 

 

Another day, another tube. The collection grows slowly, but they share smiles, and sometimes they dance just like before, in the desert, in the club. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not the same moves in the same order; they have rewritten some things, quite possibly. 

It, Zen thinks, might be part of the point. This is a remaking, after all. 

 

Jane, and Ché in the corner of her eye—and she knows Jane is there sometimes too—but above all Jane. Jane brought her stories back slowly, a thread pulling her through the white rooms and halls, and now Zen is bringing her things: the neon color of the light when they met, her part of their story, and it’s not a reward but a sharing, a giving where nobody takes because what they give is what they all have. 

The tubes are getting everything. The tubes, and the little pearls. Zen names them that, and they fill them with care. They are building their past into their future, a little getaway. 

She’s not sure if they’ll get locked up, if the stuff inside them will be cut off again. But now it’s somewhere else too. 

It’s everywhere they can take it. 

 

The place is big and bright, and full. Too many people for the cleaners to handle now. All over the country, they’d built it, and the network to keep building it. A desert, an ocean, a club in a town to bring it all together. Her and Ché and Jane, then every person who’d let them stay a night, give them warmth in the open world outside. 

Even if the cleaners could find them, they’d keep moving. They have more ways to move than they’d imagined. Another space to hide, and they don’t have to hide in it. A cave of light.

It’s everyone’s, Zen realizes, looking in from the club’s doorway. They’ve filled it up, and now there are more people who can do the job. A sudden push—she stumbles forward a step before being caught in Jane’s arms; she leans up and back. 

Their turn to dance.


End file.
